IAF bombing raids are ludicrous: there is no conceivable reason to bomb two tunnels out of 400. More importantly, IAF bombs them in such a way as to minimize Palestinian casualties. Since IAF refrains from bombing the Egyptian end of the tunnels, smugglers run there when they are attacked and survive.

Egypt employs the more fearsome tactic of flooding the tunnels and killing the smugglers, which frightens them greatly and drives many people out of that business.

We will not dwell on the fact that Israel spends more on keeping the Gazans at bay than the UNRWA spends on keeping them alive.

Radar is good while the Gaza border is closed. If relations are normalized and tens of thousands of Arabs cross daily into Israel legally rather than through fence openings, there will be no way to intercept or check them properly.

The transfer itself is not a problem: if Gazans did not receive transaction cash from Israel, they would get it from somewhere else. Israel, like any other country, profits from exporting its paper currency. Rather, the issue lies in tax transfers: Israel indirectly taxes Jewish consumers to support our Arab enemies. The continuing transfers are especially odd considering that the PA takes an increasingly militant position in peace negotiations. The transfers make Israel the PA’s largest donor.

But how do Gazans spend shekels? Since Israel instituted the blockade, they cannot spend shekels, but they cannot be hoarding that much cash, either. It is clear that despite the blockade Israeli-Gazan trade is in full swing.

Despite its use of live human shields, Hamas expresses no doubt about the propriety of its actions during the 2009 war, and refuses to launch an investigation as the Goldstone report demands.

This Israeli infamy stands in stark contrast to the Egyptian position. After Hamas members shot an Egyptian soldier, Mubarak cracked down hard on Hamas, even barring Mashaal from Egypt and practically closing the smuggling channels.

The collective punishment of the blockade only becomes a problem when Israeli doves insist that we’re conducting some police operation in Gaza rather than fighting a Jewish-Muslim war.

Israel has little choice: if she closes her border with Gaza, Egypt will be hard pressed to open the Rafah Crossing, and Israel will lose even the minimal customs control she now exercises over the goods entering Gaza.

In the meantime, four shells were fired from Gaza at Israeli population centers.

On one hand, the Iron Dome will provoke terrorists to shoot more rockets at Israel: they can both show activity to their sponsors and avoid irritating IDF with Jewish civilian casualties. Other other hand, the Iron Dome will make rocket launching futile and might eventually lead to the collapse of the Kassam industry.

The Iron Dome does not intercept shells, an increasing part of the fire from Gaza.

The facts that they have used such rockets shows that they have no problem with smuggling. Terrorists find it easier to transport virtually useless rockets into Gaza than to manufacture their own Kassam rockets.

Typically an irresponsible splinter group, often backed by Fatah in order to torment Hamas, launches a rocket at the Israeli desert to provoke the next round of clashes.

IAF’s feeble response contrasts with the “iron fist” policy Defense Minister Barak promised against IDF’s own soldiers.

Neither does the Israeli government want to crack down on smuggling, because efficient closure of the border would damage the ceasefire understanding with Hamas. If anything, Hamas profits from border closure because it extracts racketeering fees from smugglers.

By far, the bulk of smuggled goods are household stuff.

The halt will last until IDF’s next hostile action. In a typical cycle of violence, some guerrillas come dangerously close to IDF personnel near the fence, IDF responds with fire, and the Gazans shoot a few shells into Israel. IDF then retaliates against empty tunnels in Rafah, and the violence starts all over again.

In war, confidence-building and half-measures do not work.

The problem is that, according to Jewish law, Jews must kill their enemies, even when they wave flags of whatever color. In halacha, once an enemy rebels against God by refusing to heed the demands of his people, that enemy must be killed, combatants and non-combatants alike.

Leftists ignored the rocket threat to Sderot, but would support bombing Gaza into dust for an attack on Tel Aviv.

It is often alleged that terrorists have an implicit arrangement withIsrael to avoid shelling high-ticket spots. Out of 12,000 rockets from Gaza, none hit Israeli gas and oil terminals nearby, and Hezbollah is careful to direct its rocket fire toward poor villages across the border rather than at a handful of affluent and influential kibbutzim at the same range.

His demand makes sense. It is clear now that the border closure is not helping to bring Shalit back. Free cargo traffic to Gaza does not preclude Israel from controlling the movement of strategic goods, and in any case Hamas smuggles enough cement and pipes from Egypt to build bunkers and rockets.

A better option would be to close Israel’s border with Gaza forever, as any sovereign state is entitled to do, but allow Gazans to bring goods through the Rafah crossing with Egypt.

The mistake is easy to correct. Israeli tanks could retake Gush Katif within minutes, and the settlers would be overjoyed to move back in.

According to Israel, Hamas started the round of war crimes with indiscriminate shelling of Israeli civilian centers, and Israel only retaliated with adequate force.

According to the Palestinians, Israel started hostilities by blockading Gaza, and Hamas’ meager response of homemade projectiles cannot be counted as a meaningful war crime when compared to IDF’s mammoth war machine.

For us, the hopeless conundrum is solved in the Gordian knot fashion: we support our country’s military actions whether she committed what are technically war crimes, or not.

On other hand, if Israel stocks its weapons arsenals, why should the Palestinians not do the same?

Why did we need to wait for an attack before bombing the tunnels?

HRW even suggested a course of action to Hamas by classifying the rocket attacks as war crimes solely because no military installations were in the vicinity. Thus, as long as Hamas fires in the general direction of IDF bases, its actions are not terrorism. HRW is lying: since Israel and Gaza maintain a de facto ceasefire, rocket attacks are a violation of peace very similar to a war crime.

At the same time, Netanyahu made an exception for humanitarian cargo, which can mean almost anything.

The cement will be used ostensibly by UNRWA, but its institutions in Gaza are permeated by Hamas members. Since Hamas is the only force on the ground, UNRWA and other charities have to cooperate with the terrorists.

While Israel gets all the blame for the blockade, Egypt also blocks cement deliveries to Gaza through Rafah Crossing—both as a matter of cooperation with Israel and out of hatred of Hamas’ Islamic fundamentalists.

The Palestinians say they attack the troops because Israel blockades Gaza, but every state is entitled to refuse transit into another state. Israel does not blockade Gaza, but merely refuses transit.

Egypt likewise blocks the Rafah Crossing, but the Palestinians do not attack Egypt because the Egyptians won’t be bound by “human rights” considerations in conducting reprisals.

The Arabs now operate up to 800 tunnels, more than before the Gaza war.

A previous Free Gaza boat, the Dignity,  sank under odd circumstances.

The policy is not as bad as it sounds. The Gazans can travel through Egypt and Jordan. Israel, like any sovereign country, is not obliged to issue transit visas.

The problem is, if Shalit is returned can we open the crossings for Hamas to receive cement, pipes, and explosive components?

Though Hamas remains at ceasefire with Israel, Haniye praised the Palestinian fighters for what indeed was a daring attack.

Obama did not refer to the situation in Sderot as intolerable.

Obama suggested that Jews can improve their security by lifting the Gaza blockade.

That the Palestinians are preparing this petition is not news; they announced their intentions in January.

Lieberman used the petition as a pretext to beat Abbas into the dirt. Indignant, the Foreign Minister claimed that Abbas had repeatedly asked Israel to invade Gaza, and that Fatah operatives provided extensive intelligence to IDF. Humiliatingly for Abbas, the FM revealed that Fatah intelligence was instrumental in preventing mass rocket attacks on Israel during the war.

Fatah’s collaboration with Israel against Gazans will haunt the terrorist group in the next elections. Like Sharon during the Gaza disengagement, Lieberman seems to seek Hamas’ triumph in Palestine. With the demise of the only plausible peace partner, Fatah, the world might ease its pressure on Israel.

The Dignity had stayed in Lebanon for engine repairs, which could not have caused it to sink. Israeli sabotage is likely responsible for the incident.

Both need to show their supporters some action.

Hamas received portable SAM batteries, long-range rockets capable of hitting Tel Aviv, and produced Kassam-4 rockets with a reliable fourteen-mile range.

A fishing boat from Gaza with up to 1,000 lbs of explosives detonated off the Israeli cost, narrowly missing a Navy ship which spotted it.

Israel imposed no sanctions, but opened the crossings with Gaza in the aftermath of attack.

And just how are we supposed to tell the difference between true ambulances and those transporting Hamas fighters? The PHR avoided the proper conclusion: Hamas violated international law by transporting non-uniformed guerrillas under the protectionof the red cross, and Israel had to react.

Sounds good? Sounds stupid. Grad-type and Kassam-4 rockets can be fired from practically any place in Gaza. Are we going to recapture the entire Strip and make our soldiers walking targets for Hamas snipers? Or are we going to recapture isolated patches, so that an IDF detachment would be placed on every patch of land from which a rocket has been fired?

The only solution to rocket fire is to expel all of Gaza’s population into Egypt and take over the empty place.

IDF, however, refused to accept responsibility for the attacks. Unless the Arabs blew themselves with their own explosives, as happens once in a while, it seems that the army has returned to the tactics of terrorizing the terrorists through anonymous strikes.

The reason is straightforward: the figure of 0.1% of the population, though insufficient for Israeli military goals, is still grossly inflated. In modern military actions, the ratio of wounded-to-dead hovers around 6-15 to 1, so we would have expected about 15,000 Palestinian wounded. They, however, could not prove even their initially announced figure of 5,300 wounded: Gaza hospitals treated less than 2,500 patients, including “regular” ones (non-military and wounded in domestic squabbles). Hamas tried to account for the balance by claiming that thousands of wounded miraculously moved through the borders unnoticed for treatment in Jordan, Egypt, and the West Bank, where no one had seen them either.

According to Olmert, Barak is also responsible for the summer truce with Hamas, whose fuzzy terms allowed the group to bring weapons into Gaza amid Israel’s inaction. It seems that the prime minister could not override Barak on military matters while the powerful defense minister defended Hamas.

Shabak security service revealed that Hamas has restocked its arsenal to pre-war levels and added anti-aircraft missiles. Egypt does not act to prevent arms smuggling.

The intensified confrontation in Gaza has shelved the 1,400:1 prisoner exchange for good, and offers Netanyahu a chance to make good on his election-time commitment to do away with Hamas. The problem is, Hamas has nothing to do with the PIJ attacks.